This year's Kanellakis prize goes to Robert Schapire and Yoav Freund for their work on boosting. They had previously won the Gödel Prize in 2003 for their paper "A Decision Theoretic Generalization of On-Line Learning and an Application to Boosting".
Jennifer Rexford has won the Grace Murray Hopper Award.
With a mixture of pride and regret I point out that all three are AT&T Labs alumni.
If you want to know more about what these awards are given for, visit the ACM Awards page. The Kanellakis prize commemorates an achievement that spans theory and practice (has theoretical heft and has shown to be effective in practice). The Gödel Prize acknowledges a single journal paper that has had great impact in the last seven years. The Grace Murry Hopper Award is a 'young achiever' award, given to researchers below the age of 35. The Turing Award, of course, is the computer science "Nobel" for lifetime achievement. The Knuth prize is the theory lifetime achievement award.
Gödel, Turing and Knuth need no introduction. Paris Kanellakis was a professor at Brown who died tragically in a plane crash in 1995. He was one of the pioneers in database theory. Grace Murray Hopper was one of the first programmers of modern computers, the first compiler designer, and is attributed with the coining of the term 'bug' to describe an error in a program.
Where do you place the Nevanlinna prize? How do CS people look to it?
ReplyDeletePosted by Anonymous
"Where do you place the Nevanlinna prize? How do CS people look to it?
ReplyDelete"
It's a good question. To be honest, I forgot about it. However, this is an extremely well known prize and its awardee list is a who's who of theoretical computer science. It is definitely perceived as very prestigious award, probably second only to the Turing award itself.
Posted by Suresh
I think they call them bugs because one of the first computer systems had failed to operate and Grace had found a moth that had gotten trapped inside the computer and had caused a short, thus the term bug.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you find it regretful that some of your AT&T alumni have won such awards?
Posted by Rafael
While on the subject of awards, I gleaned from Lance's weblog comments that Boaz Barak has won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis on non-black-box techniques in cryptography.
ReplyDeletePosted by Anonymous
Thanks for the info about Boaz Barak. As for why I am regretful, it is because they are alumni, and are no longer with us :). The pride is because they are from AT&T :)
ReplyDeletePosted by Suresh